Tracing the use of legal themes in the gothic novel, Bridget M. Marshall shows novelists like William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hannah Crafts questioning the foundations of the Anglo-American justice system. Often invoking actual laws like the Black Act in England or the Fugitive Slave Act in America, gothic novels connect the... more...

Presenting a variety of approaches to late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. Its focus on British, American, Continental, Caribbean and Asian literature deepens our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic. more...